To All the Downtrodden Multinational Corporations: The GOP Has Your Back

WASHINGTON—Did you know that The American People are substantially burdened by a Security and Exchange Commission rule requiring that American corporations doing business overseas reveal how much money they've spent in foreign lands? (Citizens of Canada and several European countries labor under the same substantial burden, as do the citizens of Brazil, China, and Russia. They all seem to be doing fine. But what do I know?) This is called the Resource Extraction Rule, and apparently it has been a terrible burden on all of us. Mitch McConnell, Republican from Kentucky, made that very point Thursday morning on the floor of the Senate and the angels did not deafen us with their laughter, so I guess he must have been right.

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Here's a legislative critter with which we should all become familiar: the Congressional Review Act. We should all become familiar with it because it is the mechanism by which the Republican congressional majorities are going to undo a great deal of what the Obama administration did in the areas of corporate responsibility and environmental justice. The CRA was passed in 1996—another gift that keeps on giving from the Clinton Administration—and its provisions are a bit murky, but the basic result is that any regulation passed by the Obama administration after the middle of June of 2016 can be repealed by a majority vote of both houses of Congress. The vote in the Senate cannot be filibustered.

On Thursday, the Senate applied the CRA to a regulation that prevented coal companies from dumping waste products into streams. The Resource Extraction Rule probably is next. After all, back when he was running Exxon Mobil, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson personally lobbied against it.

(Here is where I thank Kate Bateman, who is married to a certain gun-grabbing Ohioan regular here in the shebeen, for hipping me to this particular issue.)

This isn't just another banal bureaucratic knife fight. In other countries, resource extraction is a polite way of describing corruption and bribery on a grand scale, and it's also a dead serious matter for local activists who are trying to take on international corporations and their native plunderers in local government, as a Human Rights Watch report from 2014 illustrates.

Yet transparency work can touch on very sensitive issues, such as the lucrative deals between governments and companies to extract natural resources. A large and growing movement pushes for public disclosure of payments to governments by oil, gas, and mining companies. Nongovernmental groups are asking how those revenues are spent, who owns the businesses that benefit from concessions, and the terms of the contracts they sign with governments. Powerful players can feel very threatened by such moves. In July, activists calling for greater transparency and fairness in dealings between the government of Niger and a foreign mining firm were arrested. They were released under international pressure. In Azerbaijan, independent groups working on corporate transparency and anti-corruption have been targeted amid a far-reaching government crackdown in which leading human rights figures have been imprisoned or exiled. Transparency activists have been smeared in the press as traitors and pressured by government officials to end criticisms that could harm Azerbaijan's business reputation. The authorities have frozen their personal and organizational bank accounts arbitrarily and without recourse. They have been subjected to intimidating interrogations, spurious tax inspections, and direct threats to their safety.

I think it was a good thing for these people who are trying to keep the wealth of their countries from being looted to know that the United States in some sense had their backs. I do not feel this is a burden at all.

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